Taking the perfect setup for an iron shot is quite an interesting proposition because all your irons are slightly different there are different lengths, there are different angles and lofts on the club face. So we can’t always have exactly the same setup for each shot but we do want to try and make it as similar as possible and as consistent as possible, so let’s look at the two changes that you need to make when you change your iron shots. The first thing is ball position; if I place the golf ball on the end of this white line here we can understand where the ball is on this line here between my feet. So if my shortest irons my sand wedge my pitching wedge my nine iron, I would advocate playing the ball exactly from the center of my stance. And as I move through my bag into slightly longer clubs I’m going to change that ball position around about half an inch per club, so eight seven six five it’s moving forward bit by bit as I come across towards this area here.

Now towards a front side that’s mainly going to be used for the woods. So we’d suggest here we start with a pitching wedge and nine iron in the middle, eight, seven, six, five some people might have a four iron three iron around about this area. So that’s the ball position changing as you change between the lengths of your golf club, that just helps the club impart the right trajectory on the golf ball, shorter clubs have lots of loft you can afford to hit down and strike those as you move through to your longer clubs they just need a bit more help being up in the air if you hit a three iron from the middle of your stance, it’s probably going to go too low, so move the ball position as you change clubs.

The only other consideration that we change the setup and how we make the setup different is we change the distance that we’re standing from the golf ball because the length of the golf club differs. So if I take a very long iron a very short iron here’s a five iron – sorry a four iron and the pitching wedge you can see they’re quite different in length. So in terms of me standing the right distance from the ball that’s a good distance for a pitching wedge but I’m way too close to it with my four iron. So a good check point here is use the length of the golf club to dictate the distance, if I take my pitching wedge here and lower it down there against my front leg it lands just one inch above my left knee cap.

And I’m not bending my knee to accommodate that or locking it up, my knee is comfortably in position like it would be to hit the shot, the club is directly behind the back of the ball lower down that’s perfect. And as I go to my four iron now clearly that would be way too high so I have to back away until it lands in the same position again, same position for different clubs one inch above my knee, so now I have got the right position for my four iron the wrong position for a pitching wedge. So those are two alterations that you should make as you are changing through your irons think about the ball position in a slightly sliding scale and the distance away from the golf ball on a sliding scale as well and if you can incorporate that into your setup with your irons those shots would be crisper and more consistent.